Confessions of a True-Blue Beer Geek

On a rainy Sunday a few weeks back, I awoke with a hangover, which comes with the hobby. A normal person wouldn't dream of leaving his warm bed to slosh through puddles toward the one part of Williamsburg which hadn't caught on that the neighborhood decided to gentrify. Yet, by noon I had arrived at a charming dump of a bar cum bowling alley cum event space, The Gutter. I bypassed the front bar where a janitor casually mopped the previous night's bodily fluids off the floor and headed to the "event space." Windowless, dingy, with poor circulation and dank air, it resembled the kind of off-the-grid spot where you'd take James Bond if you needed to torture some information out of him. I couldn't think of a better place to be.

Amazingly, other New Yorkers felt similarly and the place was soon packed with a similar type. Scruffy, pale, a few pounds overweight but mostly in the belly, with the most obscure brewery shirt possible pulled over his girth (I opted for this). The 100-person-plus crowd was about 98 percent male, and the majority of the remaining 2 percent were merely tagging along. But no attractive ladies could wrench this horde's attention away from the task at hand. No, the focus was on event organizer Tim Stendahl as he stepped atop a small platform and loudly called out, "2001 Cantillon Kriek!"

Like everyone in attendance, I am a beer geek. It's so much geekier than you think. I drink rare and exotic beers nearly every day, but the setting is rarely exotic. Parking lots, dark bars, cheap hotel rooms, windowless event spaces, it doesn't matter. The beer is all that matters. This weekend's event was "Where the Wild Beers Are," a celebration of all things wild ale, and unlike anything you've ever been to if you're a normal tippler.

The admittance fee was a mere $12, but that only bought you a logoed tasting glass. The real admittance fee was your obscure bottles. You didn't exactly have to give up an arm and a leg, but you might have given up an Arthur and a La Folie. That would be Hill Farmstead's Arthur and New Belgium's La Folie, the former a Vermont saison, the latter a Colorado barrel-aged sour brown ale. You see, for each wild beer — beer that has been exposed to so-called "wild" yeasts like Brettanomyces or bacteria like Lactobacillus — attendees were allotted ten drink tickets (twenty for uber rarities). A single drink ticket got you a single sip of anything in the house.

There were four tasting tables each with offerings of various wild styles and rarities. First come, first served. So Tim would call out, "2001 Cantillon Kriek!" or "Drie Fonteinen Golden Blend!" and this scruffy, pale bunch would scramble across the floor like shoppers on Black Friday, begging "pourers" for just a teeny 2.5-ounce taste of each delicious nectar. Afterward, we'd barely have the time to enjoy the Belgian gueuze (or check it in on Untappd, the beer geek social network) before we'd hear, "Allagash FV 13!" and sprint to the other corner. If someone who simply drank beers for fun saw this scene, they'd think they had stumbled upon a weird cult ritual.

For most, drinking beer is what they do to supplement their activities — watching sports, hanging with friends, talking to girls. Not so for beer geeks. For us, drinking is the activity. Not in a "Let's get wasted" way, more in a "Did I detect a hint of Pediococcus in this gose?" More in ticking dozens of beers off your beer bucket list in a single afternoon. Tailgating in middle-of-nowhere brewery parking lots with no game to attend afterward? Fun! Attending outer-borough "total tap takeovers" by yourself so as not to miss some obscure release from some minor nano-brewery? Incredible! They say drinking alone makes you an alcoholic. Unless you're a beer geek we snap back — a convenient excuse for a group surely testing the boundaries.

You might think you're one of us. You're proud you never drink mass-market swill. People marvel at your ability to put back "dark" beer. You're known as the "microbrew" expert amongst your friends. Heck, you've even attended a beer festival in a large field complete with tents and entry tickets on cool lanyards. But if your life doesn't frequently involve doing some of the most embarrassing, humiliating, coke-fiending things to try and taste odd beers, you're not one of us. I'm not insulting you, I admire you.

Did you see the 1997 documentary Trekkies? It was about the insanely abnormal and asocial behaviors Star Trek lovers partake in for their passion. I don't think any one outside the craft beer world realizes how similar it is, and not just due to the prevalence of fat guys with beards. Sure, our friends see us deliberate for far too long over a beer menu, or question a bartender on the freshness of an IPA, and think, "Oh, he's a beer snob." If they only knew what occurs when we get together. I'm not sure many of us in this world realize how geeky it is.

For me, it's almost a second job. A daily surfing of Beer Advocate and Rate Beer message boards for news about upcoming bottle releases. Refreshing BeerMenus.com every few hours to see if anything interesting has been put on tap anywhere close. Popping into random beer stores looking for something strange. Trying to locate limited releases around town through a relentless series of daily e-mails, tweets, and phone calls. I spend more time on the phone with beer buyers, bartenders, and beverage directors than I do my own girlfriend. There's even the urban legend of "truck followers," a small sect of the super-committed who are said to find beer distributors' delivery vehicles on the roads and then tail them, just to be the first on the scene when a rare case comes off the semi. At least I'm not that bad, I tell myself, though all of us beer geeks are much geekier than we probably realize.

"Russian River Beatification, Batch #2!"

We charge like bloated bulls to the other side of the room for a few ounces of a beer so sour it feels like your stomach lining is disintegrating. Could there be a better way to spend a Sunday?

Aaron GoldfarbAaron Goldfarb lives in Brooklyn and is a novelist and the author of 'Hacking Whiskey.'

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